My Timeless Gift for 17 Consecutive Years of Perfect Attendance at?Work

When I got a summer job at the factory where my father worked after my junior year of high school, one of his co-workers told me my dad had “nervous nerves.” That was on one of the days when I came in to work, but my father stayed home on the couch, suffering from one of his periodic bouts of depression and anxiety. Sometimes his delusional fear that he’d accidentally hurt my mom or me by, for example, chipping the lip of the orange juice bottle so that a piece of glass fell in, or dropping a coin into the milk carton, would just get the better of him. The folks at the factory seemed to like my dad a lot, but they felt bad when they saw in his eyes and demeanor that some kind of weight was on the verge of crushing him.

I tried to block out my feelings about my dad’s mental condition, and how his peers felt pity for him. I felt terrible about his pain, but even more, I felt I needed a healthy and nurturing father like my friends seemed to have. What I didn’t need was for my father’s weakness to color what people thought about me. I fought with every fiber within me to prove to myself and everyone else that I was strong enough to keep whatever inner demons tortured my father at bay. God knows I had nervous nerves of my own, but I was determined not to let them shackle me to the couch as my dad did. I had to be an Iron Man, and coming in to work even when I was sick became one of my main ways of showing it.

Just a couple of years later, in the summer of my junior year of college, my father’s torture became the worst it had ever been. Once again, he’d taken the day off from work, seeking the refuge of the couch. I had another menial summer job and easily could have blown off a day and tried to offer my dad some comfort. But no. I had to keep my record intact. When I came home I found my father hanging from a rope tied to my chin-up bar in the garage, his face distorted and his body cold and hard as stone.

Mechanism for Dealing With Trauma

Dealing with that trauma while trying to finish college and start a career proved to be the hardest time of my life. But I wouldn’t allow it to break my stride. I toughed it out and got my bachelor’s degree, took an entry-level job in sales promotion in Philadelphia, where I’d gone to college and then graduate school, and made my way to New York, which became my life’s base. It was there that I found myself, met my wife, and carved out a career in corporate communications at a global, European-based healthcare company where I worked for 35 years. My neurotic drive for an unblemished perfect attendance record never waned.

In the early years I worked at the company’s U.S. headquarters just outside Manhattan, where employees who got through the full year without taking a sick day received a “Perfect Attendance Award” — a certificate worth $20 or $30 that you could redeem for a gift at the company store.

Working in healthcare, I knew how stupid and irresponsible it was to spread my germs around the office when I came down with a cold or more serious virus. But I couldn’t rid myself of the obsession to prove by my refusal to give up physically that I possessed the mental strength to stiff-arm the unknown demons that brought down my dad. The only sickness that ever got the better of me was a stomach virus — one that would make my head spin and cause my gut to roll around in a rocky sea of nausea. I’d flop around in bed trying in vain to find a position that didn’t feel unbearable. Short of that rare condition, though, it took an awful lot to keep me home, much less supine on the couch like my suffering dad.

During a run stretching from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, I wracked up a total of 17 straight years of perfect attendance. My record spanned the middle years I worked at the company’s U.S. headquarters all the way into the decade-plus after I took on an extended expat assignment at the headquarters in Switzerland. It long outlasted the Perfect Attendance Award itself, which the U.S. operation abandoned in the late ’90s and the Swiss parent company had never implemented in the first place. But it was the perfect attendance I was after — not the award.

Hitting the Jackpot

After receiving the certificate and gift voucher following my first five or 10 years of perfect attendance — I can’t remember which — I received a special prize worth a whopping $75 at the company store.

Above, The actual travel alarm clock, next to my laptop on the desk where I write. Photo by me.

I used it to buy a silver metal travel alarm clock that opens in the middle and has a round, world atlas with 24 time zones on the left — which I never learned how to use. It’s simple and intuitive to set, has a reliable and sufficiently loud alarm, and runs forever on a single battery. It closes as tightly as a vault, too, protecting all its moving parts even when it’s being buffeted around in my luggage during trips.?

It was such a trusted and reliable partner that it become my year-round bedside time piece, reminding me every day, in sickness and in health, that it was time to go to work. It got me to early-starting conferences abroad, as I fought the haze of jet lag, and shouted me into the shower at home so I’d be on time for those odious Monday-morning leadership team meetings I hated.

But it also came and kicked off our days when my late mother visited my wife and me twice in Switzerland and joined us on trips far up into the Swiss Alps, on hikes beneath the Eiger, and along the beautiful Thunersee and Brienzersee Lakes of Interlaken.

It woke my wife and me at 5:30 a.m. at the Shamwari Animal Preserve outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa — early enough to be ready for our rifle-toting guide to pick us up and pack us into his jeep, from where we gawked in awe at free-roaming lions, cheetahs, hippos and a rhinoceros who came almost close enough to touch.

It was with us when we visited the Vatican in Rome, the Duomo in Florence, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the monastery at the top of a hill in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where a Buddhist monk gave me a single bead on slender strand of hemp that I’ve cherished ever since.?

Right now that clock is sitting here on my desk as I write. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes an alarm clock is just an alarm clock. But in this case, what sits before me is a multifaceted symbol whose meaning dives deep into my psyche and travels all the way back to my to my troubled childhood and forward to my thankfully brighter present.

I no longer feel the need to force myself to battle the demons every day. Over time they seem to have receded into the back of my mind. I’m redirecting the energy I used to use to fight them to prod myself to let go and relax, to keep the past in the past. The clock sits before me, a constant reminder of the precious currency of now.